A special CBI magisterial court on Sunday sent senior police officers Tarun Barot and Bharat Patel to one-day custody of the CBI in connection with the 2004 Ishrat Jahan encounter case. The probe agency had sought 14 days' remand of the two who were arrested on Saturday.

DSP Barot was already lodged in jail in connection with the Sadiq Jamal encounter case while Patel, an inspector in the Special Operations Group in Gandhinagar district, had carried out some of the investigation in the case after the encounter in 2004.

So far, the CBI has arrested four police officers in the case. The other two are IPS officer G L Singhal and retired DSP J G Parmar.

Ishrat, her friend Javed aliash Pranesh Pillai and two others — Amjad Ali Rana and Jishan Johar — were killed by the Ahmedabad Detection of Crime Branch (DCB) on June 15, 2004. The DCB had claimed that the four were LeT operatives on a mission to kill Chief Minister Narendra Modi. However, an SIT formed by the Gujarat High Court had concluded that the encounter was "not genuine".

In its remand application, the CBI called the encounter "false" and said that Barot and Patel played active roles in securing the illegal custody of two of the four shot dead by the SCB. It also stated that the two know about the source of the weapons that were planted on the deceased and added that their custodial interrogation was necessary to find that out.

For Patel, the CBI stated, "He had got him (Rana) to the scene of crime before the shooting and killing...happened. He played an important role in the covert transactions (not mentioned in the complaint given by Parmar in 2004) for securing and maintaining the illegal custody of the deceased persons."

"...this is a case of false (not genuine) encounter. The deceased persons were already taken into and kept unlawful detention of Ahmedabad DCB personnel. And the deceased persons were brought by the latter to the scene of of incident and killed in cold blood during the night intervening 14th and 15th of June, 2004. There was a conspiracy by the concerned police officers to commit this crime of murder and, it also involved planting of evidence, including weapons and ammunition in the Indica car and on the body of the deceased...," the CBI said in its application.

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